If I Had Your Face(32)
“Ms. Kang Wonna,” the nurse calls, and I’m ushered into the doctor’s pink office, plastered with black-and-white photos of babies and uterus renderings. The doctor behind the desk is a plump little middle-aged woman with round glasses and permed hair.
“This is your first visit with us? And your chart says you are four weeks pregnant?” she says, fiddling with her glasses as she reads my chart. “How are you feeling?”
I consider the question.
“I have a bad feeling,” I say, then stop.
“You are experiencing pain, you mean?” She looks appropriately concerned.
“Not yet,” I say. “But I can tell it’s coming.”
She raises an eyebrow and I try to explain.
“I can feel something bad is going to happen to the baby. It’s just a feeling—like a sinking. The doctor I was going to before didn’t listen to me, so here I am.” I say that last part to warn her to be careful of her words, but I am not sure if she understands me.
She looks back down at my chart.
“I see that you have had three previous pregnancies?”
“Yes.”
“And you miscarried them all?”
“Yes.”
The doctor taps her chart.
“I understand why you would be apprehensive this time around,” she says slowly, “but I want you to know that miscarriages are extremely common so you shouldn’t feel like it’s just something that happens to you. A lot of women miscarry and it’s no one’s fault. Of course, if you wish, we can run some tests to make sure all is well but I’d like to ask you some more questions first.”
She continues to ask uninteresting questions about my physical and mental state and past and I answer them automatically.
“Given everything you have gone through, do you think you may want to speak to a therapist?” she asks. It’s my turn to raise my eyebrow.
“Doesn’t that mean I lose my insurance?” I say. “I heard that if you get mental treatment, you get dropped and then no insurance company will touch you after that.”
“Oh, I don’t think that’s true still,” she says uncertainly. “But I actually don’t know for certain. You’d have to call your insurance, I suppose.”
“Yeah, no,” I say. Even if I had money to waste, it’s not like I’m having suicidal thoughts or anything. I knew I shouldn’t have brought up this premonition. I don’t know why I expected something different from this doctor.
She looks at the clock. “Why don’t we go ahead and do an ultrasound.” She turns to the nurse, who guides me to the examining table, where I quickly pull down my underwear and hoist my feet into the stirrups. The doctor rolls a lubricated condom down onto the ultrasound rod thing and gently pushes it into me, probing while we both look at the screen.
“Lights, please.” The nurse dims the lights and the doctor keeps searching for something while telling me to relax. After a good five minutes of probing, she pulls out the rod and takes her gloves off one by one.
“Well, it’s too early to see anything at all, so why don’t you come back next week and we can take another look for the sac and the heartbeat. We’ll take some blood today and run some tests. Don’t worry in the meantime. Either way, you’ll be fine.”
“Yes, I know,” I say, putting my clothes back on as fast as I can. I don’t say anything else to her and stalk out the door, trying not to look at the swollen women in the waiting room.
* * *
—
I KNOW IT’S CRAZY, but I took the entire day off for this doctor’s appointment today—Department Head Lee said, “God, what is it now?” in his sharpest voice when I told him last week. He kept asking the specific reason, but I held out to the last. “Just a personal day,” I said, looking down at his shiny brown shoes, and that’s when he proceeded to rap me on the head with a rolled-up sheaf of paper. “As everyone knows, this is why women can’t advance,” he said in a loud voice for the entire department to hear, then told me to get out of his sight.
I’d debated whether to take just a half day but it was the thought of my hour-and-a-half commute that decided it for me. So I am sitting in a bakery café on Garosugil, gloriously alone, biting into a buttery almond croissant and flicking crumbs off a scarf I just bought at the boutique on the corner. I don’t know what possessed me to buy this scarf—we are so strapped for money as it is—but it’s been a while since I bought anything and it looked so chic on the mannequin in the window. Now that I have it on, I can see that the fabric is cheap and the ends are unraveling already. Like everything else in my life, the impulsive choice—the wrong choice.
When I finally check my phone there are three texts from my husband. “Everything okay?” “Haven’t heard from you in a while, is something wrong?” “How are you feeling?”
I text a quick “Sorry, busy at work. Will call later.” I should have known he’d find a way to interrupt any happy excursion.
On the walk back to the subway station, I try to close my mind to them, but all I can see are babies in their strollers. Just how many babies are there in this city? Aren’t the government and the media always bemoaning how our birth rate is the lowest in the world?